Gavjenks
TPF Noob!
- Joined
- May 9, 2013
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- Iowa City, IA
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There are so many amazing things that could be done with modern lens technology and manufacturing methods to allow optically crazy lenses for affordable amounts of money, if you didn't have to cram in gyroscopes and motors into every lens.
I read the other thread that was just made recently about Sigma's new 18-35mm constant aperture f/1.8, and my immediate thought was "almost ALL lenses could have these sorts of advanced abilities for the same prices, if we weren't paying for all the electronic crap."
I'm not saying to stop making autofocus lenses. I'm saying to make both: autofocus lenses that have normal stats, and manual lenses that funnel all of those modern technology and engineering resources into crazily wide apertures or huge zooms that aren't low quality, or multiple diffractive optics featherweight tiny little 400mm lenses, or whatever, without ending up beyond the price that most of the market is willing to pay.
They do a LITTLE bit of this. For instance, tilt shifts from these companies are not autofocus, or for example, Canon's MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro has no autofocus. But these are cases where autofocus wouldn't really work very well, and they were forced not to do it. But all the same, this allows them to put the cost toward some amazing capabilities instead: tilft shift + large image circles. Or 5x sharp macro optics.
Why not do that sometimes WITHOUT being forced to do it by physics? Not everybody NEEDS autofocus or image stabilization or auto aperture all the time in every lens. Why do we want to pay for them every time in every lens, at the expense of other cool stuff we could be getting instead?
Why am I paying for autofocus or auto aperture, for example, in a typical fisheye lens, where my depth of field is like 20 meters most of the time, and where I never even change my working aperture for months on end? I'd much rather have it be $200 cheaper, or a few millimeters wider.
I read the other thread that was just made recently about Sigma's new 18-35mm constant aperture f/1.8, and my immediate thought was "almost ALL lenses could have these sorts of advanced abilities for the same prices, if we weren't paying for all the electronic crap."
I'm not saying to stop making autofocus lenses. I'm saying to make both: autofocus lenses that have normal stats, and manual lenses that funnel all of those modern technology and engineering resources into crazily wide apertures or huge zooms that aren't low quality, or multiple diffractive optics featherweight tiny little 400mm lenses, or whatever, without ending up beyond the price that most of the market is willing to pay.
They do a LITTLE bit of this. For instance, tilt shifts from these companies are not autofocus, or for example, Canon's MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro has no autofocus. But these are cases where autofocus wouldn't really work very well, and they were forced not to do it. But all the same, this allows them to put the cost toward some amazing capabilities instead: tilft shift + large image circles. Or 5x sharp macro optics.
Why not do that sometimes WITHOUT being forced to do it by physics? Not everybody NEEDS autofocus or image stabilization or auto aperture all the time in every lens. Why do we want to pay for them every time in every lens, at the expense of other cool stuff we could be getting instead?
Why am I paying for autofocus or auto aperture, for example, in a typical fisheye lens, where my depth of field is like 20 meters most of the time, and where I never even change my working aperture for months on end? I'd much rather have it be $200 cheaper, or a few millimeters wider.